What is the meaning of life?

Question

Ah yes, one of life's toughest questions. Does anyone have a really good answer?

Answer 1

80% of humanity, the religious folks, don't need to ask the meaning of life, the church tells them....the supernatural explanation. But the rest of us can't swallow religious dogma, because there's no evidence. Nobody can prove that there life after death, that people are tortured or rewarded after life or that there's invisible spirits running around.

I've come to two conclusions recently:

1. Life has no meaning
2. Life has a million meanings.

First, there's a certainty that death and annihilation awaits not only you, but the Earth in general. It's an astonomical certainty that our sun will supernova and leave the earth a burnt crisp, not to mention all the other extinction level events around the corner.

Second, the million things that give us meaning are the pleasurable experiences we can conjure up during the short period we are here on the earth, in the form of the relationships we have with our kids and other people, and the 'housekeeping' types of purposes. What i mean by that are the curing disease, ending hunger, improving literacy, reducing crime, preventing war, helping other kinds of things.

So the bottom line is, we only have a temporary meaning to life, to reduce pain and increase pleasure, other than that everything is lost to oblivion.


To be or not to be? "To be" is temporary and "not to be" is inevitable.....

Answer 2

Are you asking about real meaning or just the feeling of having meaning?

Real meaning comes from living for a real purpose/reason. A real purpose answers the question of "why was I put on this earth?" or "what am I meant to do with my life?". Real purpose requires a God. Here's what atheist Bertram Russell said about purpose:

“Unless you assume a God, the question of life’s purpose is meaningless.” –Bertrand Russell (20th century philosopher, mathematician and Nobel Laureate)

So, without God there can be no real meaning to life, however, through various psychological techniques we can give ourselves the feeling/illusion of meaning. Answerer 8 who said, "IMHO ... its up to you to define what that means to you", or similar things, really mean that you can get the illusion of meaning.

The primary psychological trick is as follows: Do something worthy of praise such as volunteering to mentor inner city youth. Now give yourself praise and imagine others giving you praise. Now tell yourself that mentoring inner city youth is what you were put on earth to do. Presto, the illusion of a meaningful life.

Several answers refer to evolution, e.g. "procreation", "reproduction", "to have sex", "to live", "to die", "to eat", etc.
But evolution is a mindless natural process just as weather is a mindless natural process. And evolution cannot grant us meaning any more than weather can grant meaning to a rain drop.

All honest inquiry into meaning and purpose that does not start with God will end in nihilism and death (see Answerer 1).

But God changes everything. I prefer to seek God and therefore real purpose and meaning even though I don't know for sure whether He even exists.

Answer 3

IMHO ... its up to you to define what that means to you

it may not be the same for all people, and it may change from time to time ... many people go through different 'phases'

this I know ... if you can be honest with yourself about who you are, what you think about, and what you like to do ... the closer you are to your truth

the real question to me is what is consciousness ... where does it come from, and where does it go

life is living a full life, growing old, and dying ... that is a beautiful thing, and exactly how it suppose to happen

Answer 4

The meaning of life is to find that your purpose in life is to realize that there is no meaning of life or purpose. The only thing that sets you on that quest is trying to answer that question. Eventually you find that there never was anything to find, that we are all just really without greater purpose to live our lives and die. I guess any meaning of life would be to die, because that is the only thing gauranteed to each of us, the only thing you know is going to happen. The only thing you can find is death.

Answer 5

Meaning of life depends on the thinking and point of view how much seriously we take it. In my view we should have a goal in life and from our way of living others should not get hurted be happy and spread happiness should be the motto of life.

Answer 6

in my opnion,its too experience as many things as you can while you can,its too take risks and only worry about today and too not worry about the past,bcuz the past is the past and dont worry about the future,bcuz u should just let the future happen.i think that in life everything happens for a reason!
you should just live life to the fullest and live like threres no tomorrow! :] and live for today not the past or the future!!!

Answer 7

the meaning of life is to reproduce.
to better the world by finding someone you can recreate with; someone with the traits that would coincide with your own to make a child who can make the difference you may have tried to make.
the meaning of life is it discover, to create, and to appreciate.
life is precious and nothing can be compared because life is everything.
life depends on other people
no matter how amazing the person, their existance is obsolete with out others to appreciate or compare to.

Answer 8

Life is little more than a loan shark: it exacts a very high rate of interest for the few pleasures it concedes.

Answer 9

Procreation.

Answer 10

to kill your pray each day and live life to the fulliest eat well and live well as a survivor and the rewards will be endless for your hard work and compashion.